Trump’s not the tech bros’ puppet master. He may be the puppet

Some of the Three Wise Men showed up a little late this year, and not all together, but they’ve arrived with their gifts in time for the crowning of the new secular messiah. As the inauguration of repeat president Donald Trump approaches, they have delivered their gifts. Not gold, frankincense and myrrh – those gifts are so BC. Instead, they have delivered gifts that are precious in our year Anno Domini – gifts built of bytes and computations, with the ability to sway reality.

First came space and sustainability entrepreneur Elon Musk. In 2022, he bought Twitter, for which he was mocked by many. It was, one business analyst declared, “one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history”. But in retrospect there might be a few other billionaires and institutions who now wish they’d seen its potential. He renamed the platform “X” and jiggered with the algorithm to enable “free speech”. The algorithm showed consumers when mainstream outlets sought to revise and minimise Kamala Harris’ role in the Biden administration’s deeply unpopular immigration policies. And it took Trump’s messages on the economy and immigration straight to consumers. By playing down context that didn’t suit Trump and amplifying it where it did, Musk’s gift to the King was his elevation.

Amazon founder and owner Jeff Bezos showed up with his gift next. Readers might remember that he vetoed plans at the Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris ahead of the election. But this was a mere trifle – a stocking stuffer at best. His significant offering to Trump was given via his wife. Bezos-owned Amazon has commissioned a $40 million “behind the scenes” documentary on Melania Trump. Those who have waded through her memoir, Melania, published last year – and dear reader, I subjected myself to that strange self-congratulatory Slavic self-help tome so that you can save your precious time – know that Mrs Trump’s fondest wish is to style herself as a kind of Kennedy. This documentary will give her the opportunity to tell the world how she is to be reported upon. No more of the “blink if you need help” memes from first-term-Trump this time. Melania, it will be established, is the most gracious, the most elegant, the most driven and intelligent First Lady ever to decorate the role.

And then Facebook founder and now chief masculine energy at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, showed up with his gift: a tribute to the Trumpian “vibe shift”. Zuckerberg says he’s removing fact-checking from Meta and moving to an X-style community notes system, because fact-checking has become censorship. “Governments and legacy media,” he claimed in an Instagram Reel announcing the changes, “have pushed to censor more and more.”

To the untrained eye, it looks remarkably similar to Musk’s offering. But according to Georg Zoeller, who worked in senior roles for Facebook from 2015 until 2022 (after it had rebranded as Meta), Zuckerberg is substantially upping the ante. Meta has global reach – 3 billion users worldwide, almost half of the earth’s population – and Zuckerberg is signalling that, in Zoeller’s words, “Elon may have delivered America, but I am here, and I will deliver you the world”.

If this is the case, we are looking at a tech-enabled way of doing foreign policy, in which the messages of the Trump-led US are pushed directly into foreign electorates, bypassing their governments and speaking directly to voters. Leveraging, as Zoeller puts it, “the total dependency on US tech, market and communications infrastructure to drive [Trump’s] interests past governments”.

Before we start invoking the f-word though, as many are wont to do when Trump is involved, a reminder that this is not Orange Fascism. Because Trump isn’t the one wielding it.